Panja

A blind warrior (Yodha) protects a gifted child (Moksha) from an evil witch (Irendri). This quintessential Good vs Evil fairytale takes place in the fantasy land of Angarajyam and is peppered with magical creatures, unusual happenings & symbolic undercurrents. Director Prakash Kovelamudi did not simply want to make a movie; he wanted to set new narrative & aesthetic standards in Indian cinema.

Therein lay Firefly's aphrodisiac. Diving right in, Firefly flooded in with ideas. So, Irendri's hair became a character. From it emerged snakes, much like Medusa's. But, breaking through a centuries-old assumption that these snakes are made out of flesh, Irendri's snakes were made entirely out of hair! Elements like smoke & fire would sculpt themselves into creatures. Key locations would be abstracted along the lines of an elephant, a snake and an eagle. And the climax would feature India's first all-out creature combat.

Having created such intense challenges for ourselves, we could only exist outside the box. We produced technical breakthroughs in handling CG Hair, wrote our own code, designed & executed simultaneously, created just-in-time infrastructure, ran parallel pipelines, innovated on hiring... and delivered 800+ dazzling VFX shots from ground up in less than a year. In Prakash's own words, “Firefly made the film bigger than he had ever imagined”.